Contents

Born in Andros, Bahamas in 1910, Spence was the son of a pastor, and got his start in music as a teenager playing in his great uncle Tony Spence's band.[1] After leaving school he worked as a sponge fisher, stonemason, and carpenter, and as a crop cutter in the United States.[1]

The earliest recordings of Joseph Spence were made on Spence's porch by folk musicologistSamuel Charters in 1958, with Charters initially thinking that Spence's guitar playing was the work of two players duelling.[1] These were released by Folkways Records on the album Music of the Bahamas Volume One in 1959.[1]

In 1964, Fritz Richmond travelled to The Bahamas to record Spence, and recordings made in Spence's living room were issued on the album Happy All the Time.[1] The following year, Jody Stecher and Peter Siegel made the trip to record Spence, recording tracks also featuring Edith and Raymond Pinder and their daughter Geneva, which were released on The Real Bahamas Volume One.[1] These tracks included Spence's arrangement of "I Bid You Goodnight" which was covered by The Grateful Dead and Ralph McTell among others.[1] The album was a success, and led to Spence touring the US, with a second volume released in 1978.[1]

Spence's repertoire encompassed calypso, blues, folk music and sacred songs.[1] Spence played a steel-string acoustic guitar, and nearly all of his recorded songs employ guitar accompaniment in a Drop D tuning. The power of his playing derives from moving bass lines and interior voices and a driving beat that he emphasizes with foot tapping. To this mix he adds blues coloration and calypso rhythms to achieve a unique and easily identifiable sound. He has been called the folk guitarist's Thelonious Monk.[5]